He was not only a major creative force on those first two albums, but he gave focus and shape to Reed’s creative force. Dismiss this as muso chin stroking if you like – what difference does it make if the Velvets were a bit Welsh? – but I think there is value in figuring out the nature of the stuff that went into the sound and vision of the greatest rock n roll band of all time. I am – I think it’s becoming clear – setting up an argument that the real Velvet Underground is The Velvet Underground of that first album (and, by extension, the second), and that Velvet Underground was most definitely partly Welsh. It points toward the melodic ideas of his great solo hits just around the corner such as those found on Transformer (1972), glammed up by Bowie’s production just as once Reed’s songs had been glammed down by Cale’s grating viola. It is a superior rock album filled wall to wall with great pop songs, but it boasts few of the component parts that made VU so special. Loaded (1970), the band’s last album proper, is stripped of many of the drones and right angles and slow turns of the earlier albums. In Todd Haynes’ movie there are snippets of Reed being generous on this point about his other band members. Reed used that early Velvet Underground set-up as a springboard to his own singular way of doing things that would become embodied in his long solo career. Nico, the iceberg in the centre of all the muck and dust, had also floated away. Andy Warhol had been sacked as manager and producer by Reed. And before Cale had gone, other iconic figures associated with the band had already departed. Other members, including Morrison and Tucker, peeled away, either by choice or by circumstance. After the second album, when Cale was sacked by Reed, the Velvets were just Lou Reed’s backing band. Moe Tucker’s distinctive drum technique, heavy and grey, would have likely fitted with no other band of the era so well. Sterling Morrison’s guitar style, immediately recognisable as that eerie, exotic, jagged shuffle, lays all across those first two albums like razor wire. Their creative visions collided to create that unique sound. At the beginning, The Velvet Underground was a spark that flew because Lou Reed met John Cale. And it depends on what you consider to be the definitive line up of the band. It depends if you are counting creative input, or whether you’re divvying up the band members into equal parts as sound contributors. Or so goes some interpretation of the maths. Lest we forget, The Velvet Underground was a quarter Welsh. The music of collars pulled up tight and shoulders hunched and hands pushed down hard into pockets. It was the music of the dank drizzled Welsh streets, hit blind by the fizz of the neon lights. It was the music of the earth, of the soil, but of concrete too. It wasn’t classical and it wasn’t psychedelic. It wasn’t The Beatles, and it wasn’t the Blues. When I first heard The Velvet Underground – “Venus in Furs” on a compilation tape – it seemed to come from a different place to everything else I’d been listening to. The Velvet Underground had gotten under my skin. Something about that primal chiming of those propulsive chords kept bringing me back to the idea. But I stuck to my guns all through the brief existence of that combo and carried it forward into the maelstrom of several other bands I would join and found in the following years. The other band members wanted nothing to do with it. The second thing that is untrue of that opening memory is suggestion that this was a communal ambition. We wanted it to go on for centuries, “like Chinese music”, as John Cale says in the new Todd Haynes Velvet Underground documentary. Chug chug chuddugug, chug chug chuddugug, chug chug chuddugug, chug chug chuddugug. Firstly, the band’s ultimate ambition was not to do this for an hour, but to do it for several hours, or indeed, for days, months, weeks, without stopping. We wanted to make the music sound like the base noise of the universe, the undersound, that leftover harumph of the Big Bang. We wanted to bring the walls down of any pub or community hall or club who were unsuspecting enough to book us, rattle the foundations like those chords were the terrible reverberations of an industrial drill, a drill the size of the Empire State Building. We would play that song true to its five-minute duration, but then we would hammer the three chords of its closure over and over for the remaining fifty-five minutes. When I was young, I was in a band whose ultimate ambition was to do an hour-long gig that comprised of one song, a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On”. Gary Raymond ponders the Welsh credentials of the greatest rock n roll band of all time, asking how Welsh were The Velvet Underground?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |